Monday, October 05, 2015

The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy

Human corruption is so pervasive
in James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia (The
Mysterious Press, 1987) that one thinks of abject darkness when one thinks of
the novel at all.It projects a
convincing world, but in its underlying ambiance of doom and pessimism it
ultimately generates its own inner logic, so that as one plot twist after
another throws the reader off kilter, the element of shock and surprise
dissipates.

Here we have a character, police
detective Bucky Bleichart, whose interest in a horrific crime becomes
increasingly entangled with his own inner sense of shame and failure, his
pathological fascination with a promiscuous young woman who had been savagely
murdered and cut in half before he ever knew of her existence.His erotic obsession with her, his sense of
loyalty to friends and his partner, betrays him.

Ellroy has no faith in human
character and institutions.The police
are corrupt and venal, the prosecuting attorney is a political opportunist, the
whole institution of law enforcement devotes itself to solving a crime because
of the media’s obsessive fascination.

It seems to me that late in the
novel, Mr. Ellroy grows tired of his own games, and he rather easily and
simplistically dispenses with key elements of the mystery that he had taken
hundreds of pages to introduce.A key
bit of information, heretofore hidden from our narrator, is casually revealed
by a secondary character, and suddenly an entire dimension of what this novel
is about stands resolved, in a matter of a paragraph or two—this happens not
through the machinations of the protagonist, but rather through the arbitrary
sharing of information.

Bleichart writes in his
prologue, “I never knew her in life.She
exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.
Working backwards, seeking only facts, I reconstructed her as a sad little girl
and a whore, at best a could-have-been—a tag that might equally apply to me.”